The Night I Finally Drove Away

The wrapping paper was still warm from the fireplace when I pulled the rubber stopper out of a two dollar piggy bank and watched two crumpled one dollar bills fall into my palm.

Outside the window, snow was coming down sideways over the gravel drive of my parents’ place outside Doe Run, Missouri, and my sister Cleora was standing in front of it in her socks, screaming loud enough to wake the dog, because there was a brand new red pickup truck sitting under our carport with a bow the size of a hula hoop tied to the grille.

“It’s got heated seats,” she kept saying, like the words tasted good. “Dad, it’s got heated seats.”

My father, Collen Birdsong, stood behind her with his hands in his coat pockets, grinning the way he used to grin at high school football games when Cleora made the homecoming court. He was fifty eight years old and I had maybe seen that exact smile turned on me twice in my whole life, both times by accident.

I was sitting cross legged on the living room floor in the spot I’d sat in every Christmas since I was six, wrapping paper scraps around my knees, holding a plastic piggy bank shaped like a cartoon pig wearing a Santa hat. The price tag was still stuck to the bottom of it. A dollar ninety nine, from the Dollar General out on Route Y.

“Go on, Burnell, see what’s inside,” my mother said, clasping her hands together like she’d given me something that mattered.

I turned it over and worked the rubber stopper loose. Two bills slid into my hand, soft and worn, like somebody had been carrying them around in a wallet for a while before they thought of this.

Nobody said anything for a second. Then my father let out a little laugh, the kind you’d give a joke that landed halfway.

“Start of a rainy day fund,” he said. “You’re always so careful with money anyway. Figured you’d appreciate the thought more than Cleora would.”